We are proud to be watAgamers – our shared vision and the family-like atmosphere bind us together as a team. Together we aim to operate and develop kids’ first social media experience and educate young children in how to behave online.

Our Community and Security Team consists of an valuable mix of different European nationalities and expertise in a variety of academic fields. Our cultural diversity unifies in a common goal: to create a fun and safe first social media experience for children – Momio.

We would love to bring you a little closer to our watAgame family and tell you who we are.

INTRODUCING INGSE

Let’s start with our Norwegian Community Manager Ingse, who has been working for watAgame for a long time – but recently got a great promotion with new responsibilities.

Who could be more fit to talk about Ingse than… Ingse herself. :)

Hey Ingse! What is your background?

Hi! I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Business Administration, and a Master’s Degree in Service Management – with a Minor in Sustainable Business.

The reason for choosing the Minor regarding sustainability was my interest in ethical business, which also is the reason that I wanted to work in watAgame in the first place. For me, it is important to work for a company that shares the same values as me. That’s why I am so proud to say that I am part of the watAgame team – since that is probably the safest, but also the coolest social media platform kids can find today.

What do do you do when you are not at work?

Whenever I’m not working, there is a high risk of finding me at the nearest crossfit box. The community that crossfit provides is just fantastic – and no matter how weird it might sound, throwing heavy weights around makes me happy! For me, the best way to spend an evening is to get through a hard workout together with my teammates, or focusing on correcting small details that will sharpen my technique and enable me to do better. I’m a great fan of the strong mentality game in sports, and I try to bring that attitude with me wherever I go. Great things comes from hard work, a positive attitude and a big smile!

What are your tasks at watAgame?

My primary responsibility as Community Manager is to keep Momio Norway safe, by working with our safeguard tools and making sure our users can have fun in a protected environment.

I enjoy leading the Norwegian speaking team, consisting of many talented moderators and a supporter. They are a blast to cooperate with, and we take great pride in calling ourselves Team Momio Norway! Another of my favourite tasks is to write blog posts for this blog. To reflect over the work I do and organize my thoughts into a one-page post, is just very me – see examples here and here. This also gives me the opportunity to create new content and share some insights from working with the team, kids and guardians. Furthermore, I have tasks such as communicating with both users and guardians by email to answer their questions, improving the SEO, convey local user insight to product and campaign development, and translating both local and ad sales campaigns from English, Danish or Swedish to Norwegian.

Why do you like working at watAgame?

I love working at watAgame, since that gives me the opportunity to do something I find useful – every single day. Firstly, we have the possibility to teach kids about how to behave on the internet, which I believe is very important for this generation growing up with access to electronic devices. There should be room to make mistakes – but on Momio kids will quickly learn how and why they should behave nicely towards each other, and learn from it! Thereby, they are being protected in their first meet with social media, and it feels great to contribute to them having a good experience.

Secondly, we also take initiatives for children to express themselves and discuss what they learn in school or life in general. This challenges them to express themselves in words or pictures – but they also learn a lot from sharing experiences and by the storylines we run on Momio. I love hearing how creative and open-minded kids are today! It’s very inspiring to work with them, as they really find joy everywhere. I believe we as adults have a lot to learn from kids in that sense!

Thanks for letting us know you better, Ingse! Feel free to post questions to her in the comments.

About the author:

Lill Hennschen, Momio

Lill has been employed as a German Community Manager since May 2013 and works with content creation, online safety and translation. She has a Bachelor degree in Humanities and Communication and a special interest in equality studies. Besides this, she volunteers for Red Barnet Ungdoms project MobSquad – an initiative trying to prevent bullying and segregation in primary schools.

Screen time is a much talked about issue in the digitalized world of today. Different kinds of screens, be that mobile phones, tablets, computer or TV screens, seem to take a lot of our time. At least in Finland the often used recommendation of screen time is two hours per day, and that seems to be awfully outdated.

The Finnish Society on Media Education wanted to investigate how Finnish media education professionals (e.g. people working in the field of media education and students of media education) perceive the term screen time. A questionnaire on the topic was opened for two weeks in April 2016. The initiative for the inquiry came from the Finnish Facebook group Media Educators’ Network (Mediakasvattajien verkosto).

In total, we received around 60 answers from media education professionals representing many different occupations and organizations from all over Finland. Most answers came from teachers, kindergarten teachers, youth workers, students, researchers, and library workers.

We set out to find answers for the following questions:

Is screen time a relevant term when it comes to discussing the media use of children and the young?

Are quantitative recommendations relating to media use necessary (e.g. how many hours are recommendable)?

Should we make other kinds of recommendations concerning the media use of children and the young?

In addition, we aimed to find tips for how to approach, understand, and control media use of children and the young, and how professionals see the media education field of today in general – and where it is heading.

The respondents saw screen time both as a relevant and as an outdated term. Answers show a clear need for shared norms and recommendations to help parenting and education in the changed media landscape of today. However, the term ‘screen time’ was seen as too ambiguous – meaning that more of a qualitative approach and focus on the media contents themselves is needed. Quantitative (e.g. based on time) recommendations were seen as both necessary and unnecessary. The respondents saw recommendations necessary especially for young children, as they can make parents think more about the media use of their children and how it should be handled.

Content matters

What children actually do with their ‘screens’ and what kind of content they consume was seen as way more important than simply concentrating on time spent in front of screens. In addition, parents and educators should be interested in how children and the youth use media and one good way to do that is to learn from the children themselves about their media use. Naturally, time spent in front of screens should be reasonable and one should be able to self-regulate their media use. However, it is important to remember that children are individuals and what is too much time spent in front of a screen for one kid, may not be too much for another. Thus, we should aim for a balanced everyday life and well-being. Media education should be a part of education from early on, as it could help in this.

The respondents had many great thoughts about how to approach and understand children’s media use, such as media education for adults and benefitting from the knowhow of the young. Some current topics in media education and challenges for the future raised by the media education professionals were digitalization of education, accessibility, privacy, commercialization of media, children’s rights, and the division in the field of media education and the need for cooperation. Do these topics and issues sound familiar to you?

More conclusive report on the results of the study will be given later this fall, when “Screen Time Week”, an online campaign organized by the Finnish Society on Media Education together with its partners, will take place on the 10-14 October 2016. During this week, blog posts from Finnish and European media education professionals (including watAgame’s Silja Nielsen) will be posted on our website mediakasvatus.fi and the results from the study will be presented in different forms. A summary and a slideshow of the results will be available in English as well, as will some of the blog posts. It is going to be an interesting week – see you in October!

About the author:

Arla Pitkämäki, The Finnish Society on Media Education

The Finnish Society on Media Education, founded in 2005, is an association operating nationwide in two main languages (Finnish and Swedish). Our aim is to support and develop the field of research and practices concerning media education, contribute to the public debate and provide opportunities to share media education experiences online and offline. The main forum for Finnish media education is a website mediakasvatus.fi in Finnish, mediekunskap.fi in Swedish and mediaeducation.fi in English. Finnish Society on Media Education is funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture and by our members.

Arla Pitkämäki, Master of Arts, is an intern at the Finnish Society of Media Education. As minor subjects, she has studied Media Education and Communications, in which screen time has been a much talked about issue.

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We had a fantastic summer on Momio. Our brand characters Emily and Lucas took the kids on a trip around the world. The trip lasted several weeks and included everything from midsummer in Sweden and high fashion in Paris to a safari in Kenya and a fiesta in Mexico. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully also a bit educational. Some of our active users created pictures of their momios in these destinations – see some examples here:

Meanwhile Jack, Momio’s police officer, stayed at home and got lots and lots of tips from momios on how to spend a great summer vacation at home. Momios were very excited and showered Jack with tons of helpful tips.

Behind the scenes here at the watAgame office we could definitely feel that kids had more time to spend online in the summer months. While most kids behaved well, especially the first school vacation days brought along an explosion of trolls. While checking these cases, we could almost see the kids behind them – snickering with a friend, trying to come up with something ridiculous to write while their parents were at work. Cheeky!

That’s OK – and that’s why we’re here. We got rid of all the trolls. Just between you and me, we might even have chuckled at some of the most inventive ones.

BACK TO SCHOOL

Now that the school year started or is about to start, the behaviour has changed. Kids get new friends and face new challenges at school, so they don’t have so much time to spend testing the limits online. Instead we’ve witnessed a total mind shift and see a lot of happy discussions about the everyday school life: what did you get for homework, what is your teacher like, what is your favourite subject and so on.

As the school year progresses, the challenges and trends evolve too. But worry not: We are always here, always on top of what is going on – and updating you on the latest news.

Silja Nielsen, Momio

Silja Nielsen is Head of Community and Safety at Momio. She has worked at the company since 2010. Silja has a master’s degree in Media Studies and is interested in privacy, online behaviour and online communities.